


Growing Up Joe

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Foxtrot [50]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, The Dollhouse - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, Dollhouse-level non-con, Gen, not actually RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 19:55:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6253795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the comment_fic prompt: <i>any. any. Five reasons not to celebrate one's birthday.</i> Five of Joe's birthdays. Spans from pre-series to post-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Growing Up Joe

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for child abuse and domestic-violence-related child abuse.

1\. When Joe was turning ten, he was pretty sure his parents had forgotten his birthday (Mom was working too hard, Dad was drunk like usual). So on the morning of, when he saw his father sitting at the kitchen table, he asked if they were doing anything for his special day. His father said nothing, just struck. Joe saw stars, felt blazing pain in his head. He woke in the hospital the next day with a concussion and a shattered cheekbone and, if anyone asked, told them he'd had a little too much fun playing football on his special day.

2\. Turning thirteen was a huge deal. Finally a teenager. Later curfew. Allowed to go to the lame middle school dances they had sometimes on Friday nights. Joe spent his special day out on his grandpa's farm, mucking out the stalls, milking cows, and wrangling bales of hay. When he finally made it home, exhausted, he sprawled out on his bed without even taking his shoes off. He was awakened sometime later by a familiar orchestra - father screaming, mother crying, the rhythm of fists on flesh. He rolled out of bed and slid under it, waiting, wary of footsteps. When silence fell, he dared to emerge. He sat on the bed and doodled in his notebook, tooling around with some of the new algebra formulas he'd learned at school last week. He knew he was safe when Mom slipped into his room. She had a little cupcake on a plate. She sat beside him on the bed and planted a candle in the green frosting, lit it. Her tears extinguished it before he could blow it out after he made his wish, so he huddled close to her and gave her half the cupcake and decided the next year that he wouldn't even bother with his birthday.

3\. Joe had planned meticulously so he could get his driver's license on his sixteenth birthday. The first time he got to drive all by himself, no adult supervision, he took his unconscious mother to the hospital because she had 'fallen down the stairs' yet again. Not even the nurses bought it anymore, and when they looked at him in disgust, he could only look away.

4\. Joe officially turned eighteen somewhere along I-80 between Omaha and Lincoln. His mother was asleep in the passenger seat, a massive bruise blooming on her cheekbone. She had her purse and all the cash she could carry. They'd pawned her wedding ring at the first pawn shop they found. The only thing Joe had brought with him was his acceptance letter to Stanford.

5\. Joe didn't get a nineteenth birthday. Or a twentieth. Or any of innumerable birthdays after that, although as Foxtrot he was a party favor for plenty of other people's birthdays. John Sheppard was only a few weeks older than him, so he marked time with John's birthdays, but John didn't get to celebrate all of his birthdays either. Joe felt awful when he finally had a body and a mind of his own and Evan baked him a birthday cake, and John and Rodney and Sam and Daniel and Cam and his mother were all singing to him, and he burst into tears.


End file.
